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Cracking the Google Associate Cloud Engineer Certification

Cloud Spanner

Explore how Cloud Spanner offers a globally scalable relational database solution combining strong consistency, high availability, and SQL support. Learn to create instances, databases, tables, and perform queries using both the GUI and CLI. Understand key features, advantages, and use cases that make it ideal for enterprise-level cloud applications requiring global scale and transaction reliability.

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In the last lesson, we saw how Cloud SQL can be used for lifting and shifting the existing on-premises relational database server. We have also learnt about the limitation of CloudSQL. So, in this lesson, we will look at Cloud Spanner which is the upgrade to the CloudSQL. Cloud Spanner combines the best of relational DB’s feature with the benefits of sharding and horizontal scaling. So, let’s start exploring Cloud Spanner.

Introduction

Cloud Spanner is a fully managed relational database with unlimited scale, strong consistency, and up to 99.999% availability. Unlike CloudSQL, Cloud Spanner provides an in-browser query interface where you can query data.

Cloud Spanner is much like CloudSQL in most of the aspects however, the Spanner is more powerful. So, let’s see how exactly Cloud Spanner works.

Architecture and working

Behind the scenes, Spanner separates the compute and storage and allow them to scale independently. From the compute and storage, we have control over compute power meaning we can select how much compute power we need by providing the number of instances.

Then, these instances and the data is replicated across regions to provide high availability. Keep in mind that currently, replication is done for a maximum of 4 regions.

We can increase the compute power at any time just by increasing the number of instances.

Advantages

The advantages of Cloud Spanner are:

  • You get all the benefits of relational semantics and SQL with unlimited scale.

  • You can start at any size and scale with no limits and no downtime as your needs grow.

  • Enjoy high availability with zero scheduled downtime and online schema changes.

  • You can deliver high-performance transactions with strong consistency across regions and continents.

  • Cloud Spanner provides automatic sharding, so there is no manual work for enhancement.

Let’s see where ...